Polkit on Duktape

[Shawn Walker-Salas]

On 09/08/2015 10:37 AM, Simon McVittie wrote:
...
> I personally don't have a strong objection to JS as an embeddable
> configuration language: general purpose systems often need it anyway, if
> only for proxy autoconfiguration support (I'm not a fan of proxy
> servers, particularly non-transparent ones, but large corporations seem
> to be inexplicably keen on them). However, I'm not a maintainer of
> polkit in Debian (the maintainers are Michael Biebl and Martin Pitt) so
> my opinion counts rather less than theirs.

One of the distributions I help maintain was debating whether to simply 
disable proxy configuration file support entirely or work on 
modularising if further as various administrators have complained about 
the fact that installing libproxy dragged in a pile of desktop 
dependencies (because we were linking to the libmozjs in the Firefox 
package rather than using the standalone libmozjs due to concerns others 
mentioned about stability, security, etc.).

I wonder if the subset of javascript support that's really generally 
needed for proxy autoconfiguration is small enough that it could be 
transpiled and handled by a much smaller, safer interpreter such as lua, 
etc.  I suspect the answer is "in most cases, but not all, so it would 
break things" :-(

-- 
-Shawn